


Mattoo: 57, Moriarty: 56 (not that they’re keeping score)

by anamatics



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Canon Queer Character of Color, Gen, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 16:32:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamatics/pseuds/anamatics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She reads old books, another concession that has been allowed to her since they’ve removed her from Newgate and into the warehouse by the water.  She’d given them a name for the books, a name that hasn’t been used in years, but a name none the less.  Moriarty, after all, is just a means to an end. They’d wanted to know her true name, but they’d never specified which one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mattoo: 57, Moriarty: 56 (not that they’re keeping score)

She reads old books, another concession that has been allowed to her since they’ve removed her from Newgate and into the warehouse by the water.  She’d given them a name for the books, a name that hasn’t been used in years, but a name none the less.  Moriarty, after all, is just a means to an end. They’d wanted to know her true name, but they’d never specified which one.

(For that they’d put a bag on her head before they’d moved her, as though it might help to disguise the location of her new prison.)

They don’t know that the smell of the ocean is her blood, the salt and the sea blend together with the scent of abandoned, ill-used petrol and oil.  She can smell it even inside a perfumed, carefully climate-controlled room.  The sea weighs heavily on her bones and seeps into her skin.  The salt and the damp creep into her lungs and she feels it gather there, lingering, another weight she has yet to carry.

They’ve taken her to the Brooklyn Naval Yard.  How interesting…

Her jailor, Ramses Mattoo, is a good man, his partner sounds lovely as well. They’ve given her a homosexual guardian on the warning of Sherlock Holmes.  It is an unnecessary precaution, but one she takes to heart and commits to memory anyway.  She’s not about to attempt to sleep with every man she encounters.  To do so would be rather dull and time consuming.  Sex is a mundane experience to her, it doesn’t carry the weight that Sherlock is convinced it does. 

Still, she likes Mattoo.  She likes how he talks, when he’s not paying attention, stacking heavy books out of crates made of cheap pine and rusting nails.  He tells her of his partner, freshly come up from DC to explore New York with him for the first time.  She recommends a good, if unknown, restaurant and a trip to the botanical gardens. Later, freshly sexed and happier than he’s been in weeks, he tells her of his family back in DC, and how he misses being able to see them.  She encourages him to take a vacation.

He has the look on his face, like he’s about to share once more, unpacking a crate of old books that look as though they’ve been purchased at an estate sale.  She stays silent, eyes trained on the book titles.  Intrigued, she reaches for one and pauses to run her fingers over the wood of the crate’s top, splinters catching in the calloused pad of her index finger, wood into the body, same as bone and damp.  One of the larger pieces has come loose, lodged deeply into the pad of her finger. 

Bugger.

It bleeds a little and stings quite a lot, and he scowls at her before disappearing out beyond the door and rummaging in the first aid kid he always carries with him in his bag. He comes back brandishing a pair of tweezers (that he insists he use - a potential weapon, you see).  They sit beside each other on the sofa and he pulls the pine wood slivers from her fingers, one by one.  Her blood gets all over his fingers, he doesn’t seem to mind.

"You’re not at all what I expected," she tells him, taking the band-aid he offers and wrapping it carefully around her bleeding finger.  "I don’t meet very many men who share your predilections from your part of the world."

"I’m from DC," Mattoo points out, putting his tweezers away and moving towards the door.  His companion (Agent Thad Jennings although he almost never speaks) moves to stand authoritatively in front of her while the door is open.  As it hisses closed once more, Mattoo laughs and adds, "That’s hardly exotic."

She says nothing in response, stepping around Jennings and picking up the book she’d reached for initially, before her finger had gotten sidetracked with little splinters of wood.  It’s title is in Latin, and it intrigues her endlessly.  She wants to curl up and read it, to peel apart the pages and see how much of the language she remembers from school. 

"Do I need to get you a dictionary?" Mattoo jokes.  He’s collecting the crate now, making sure that it’s empty and he’s left no nails behind.  Because that would make this far too easy.  The salt and the sea are in her lungs now, and she daren’t let the damp spew forth until she’s ready to leave.

She raises an eyebrow at him, the book clutched tight to her chest. A shield, or perhaps a prop to look vulnerable.  She’s always been a good actress. “Do you truly think so little of me, Agent Mattoo?”

"Your Arabic is horrible."  He points out.

"You’re from DC," she replies smoothly, her face carefully neutral.  She doesn’t want him to know she’s playing with him.  "What do you know about Arabic?"

He inclines his head to one side, which brings their point total even once more.  She thinks it’s 56-all at this moment.  She’ll have to check her maths against the careful accounting she’s made of his insults in the little book she’s been provided to document her thoughts.  She gives him a small, closed-off smile and watches him sweep from the room with the remains of the crate in his arms.

The sliver that had been embedded in Jamie’s finger is now digging into her palm and she takes it out and holds it up to the light as Agent Jennings heads off to do his typical sweep of the premises.  The wood is lovely and old, aged by time and outdoor weather.  It smells of musty basement and she clutches it tightly to her chest for a moment before slipping it into her pocket. 

She settles down with her book, fingers following the Latin easily.  This is not going to be like another misadventure with that Arabic novel from last week, which is good. She’d hid it well, but Mattoo had seen right through it and had brought her a dictionary that had sent her into a mood for close to three days. 

Her Arabic, however, is now much improved.

She asks for old books because she’s looking for something that she doesn’t quite know how describe.  Words on a page, words with power behind them.  Words that she’s afraid to utter out loud.  She’d first chanced upon them as a child, having gotten so utterly lost in London and that she’d found herself in a truly strange neighborhood indeed.  She’d stood and watched as ordinary humans had made extraordinary things happen. 

Jamie, and that truly is her name, had seen a pot thrown on a wheel that would always be wet with water.  She’d seen a rug woven to keep out dirt.  She’d seen tailoring that with stitches so perfect that they would never rip and she’d struggled half her life to learn how to be as they are.  To ask for things that should not be given, and to create beauty and grace where none should be had. 

She finds that the sea and the salt air are what makes it easiest.  She favors the water and all that comes with it.  She spends much of her time plotting at a cottage by the sea, standing up to her ankles in the sand as the tide ebbs and flows over her feet.  It is only with the water frothing at her presence that she can cast her mind wide and see all threads and possibilities from a single action.

She’d studied mathematics at university, she’d written extensively on numbers and theorems and natural phenomena.  But she’s drawn to the natural order of things more so than anything else. She likens, when she’s alone, her organization not to a web but to the steady curl of the golden spiral.  At the center she is phi, and out from her the spiral grows, an outward funnel that captures all and leads all paths, as they usually do, back to the center, and herself.

_Circulum late filum unum principium_ , the book reads.  To draw a circle widely, start with a single thread.

She draws a thread from the hem of her shirt, pulling until it comes free and reaches down to pick up a piece of charcoal from the floor where it’s fallen.  Eyes bore into her and she turns to stare at the picture of her downfall once more.

"You’d like to understand, wouldn’t you?" she says to it, drawing the ratio on the floor and arranging the thread within it.  "I would like to understand you as well, Joan Watson."

The spiral circles out from phi and she stares down at it, the blood from the cut earlier dripping down from her fingertip - the band-aid tugged off and cast carelessly aside.  The wood comes next, and then an offering all her own.  A smashed jar of paint for a sharp piece of glass and the simple tilt of her head. 

Hair is strong, it does not cut easily.  She does a horrible hack job and it falls to the ground.  She feels lighter, somehow, blood and wood and hair landing carelessly upon one of the most beautiful things in the world, crudely etched out by her own hand. 

The first time Jamie Moriarty lets herself out of her warehouse prison comes with the price of her vanity.  Her vanity is the hair that she’s loved all her life and allowed to grow too long to be practical, especially in her line of work.  She lets it fall and the sea pours out from within her, a hollow under the earth that consumes her and leaves nothing but a hole in the concrete floor of her prison. 

That night she meets Mattoo’s lovely partner.  She has tea with him, finger still bleeding as it counts down the minutes to midnight.  He tells her that her haircut is truly horrible and recommends a salon.  She files it away for the next time she finds cause to leave her jailors.  He has kind eyes and she can understand, on some level, why Mattoo likes him. 

She walks through Times Square, a ringing in her ears that has nothing to do with the noise of the place and then takes a cab to Brooklyn.  She stands outside the brownstone home of Sherlock Holmes for what feels like hours, watching the two residents move about the place. 

She wants to waltz up to them, to flaunt that she’s been able to leave, but the sacrifice was for but an afternoon and she doesn’t want to waste it trying to explain to Sherlock and his Watson why she’s suddenly free.

She walks down to the park near where Watson and Sherlock live.  She stands on the greenway there, fingers twining through her short hair, smearing blood all over her cheek and forehead.  The air here is fresh and cool, so different from the air in her prison.  She wants to linger here, to be out in the open, but it is not her time, not just yet.  She’s sent the messages she’s needed to send, a series of envelopes produced from a plastic bag they didn’t know she had and dropped into a box on a street with no name.  Now it is just a matter of time, a waiting game.

And when a distant clock starts to chime midnight, she charms a cabbie to let her off by the water and walks back into the sea.

She emerges, wet and spluttering, sprawled across the floor of her prison.  She’s choking on water she didn’t know she’d swallowed, and it’s only when she rolls over and vomits sea water and bile and the tea from earlier that she notices Mattoo staring down at her.

"No more Latin books, I’m afraid," he says, offering her a hand and helping her to her feet. 

He doesn’t ask how she’s done it, but she awards him a point all the same.  After she’s struggled to sit up she takes the towel he holds out to her without a word, wrapping it around herself and wheezing, bloody finger already staining the brilliant white of the towel crimson.  It will not be long now, they will come.

**Author's Note:**

> was having a re-read of the few original Moriarty stories ACD, but that did not cause this fic to happen. Was having thinky thoughts about why Moriarty cut her hair, but this did not cause this fic to happen. I really don't know what caused this fic. It's rather strange.


End file.
